General Election 2020: NC results

While we're all watching Georgia and Pennsylvania for up-to-the-minute data, I decided to dig in a little to my own state of NC. It's still not been called, and the lead appears pretty solid for Trump. I dug in a little more, though. 

First: They're estimating that 95% of the vote is in, leaving approximately 287k outstanding to be counted.

In order to overcome the nearly 77k margin Trump has currently, Biden would need to have a margin of about 26.7% in those outstanding ballots.

Can he do it? Well... we also see this data on the page. Currently in the absentee counts, Biden has a margin of ... 4.5%. Which is ... a lot less than 26.7%.

But stick with me here for a moment! I didn't start this post to make you sad.

If you want, you, too, can go download the Current Absentee File from the NC State Board of Elections. 

WARNING: it's 2 GB and many spreadsheet programs won't want to open something that big without Severe Problems. 

So instead I processed this data on the command line using my handy ol' grep & awk commands. If you don't know what that means, don't worry:

I did Computer Wizardry to get stuff from the file without having to open it all at once. This will get nerdy for a sec here. Sorry.

1. Step 1: grep ",MAIL," absentee_20201103.csv >> absentee_by_mail.csv
   (Find all the lines that had a ballot request type of "mail" rather than "one-stop" (the in person early voting).)
2. Step 2: grep ",\"ACCEPTED\"," absentee_by_mail.csv >> absentee_by_mail_accepted.csv
   (Specifically filter out the rows that were accepted, thus excluding any that were requested but not returned.)
3. Step 3: awk 'match($0, /,MAIL,[^,]*/) {count[substr($0,RSTART+6,RLENGTH-6)]++}END{for(j in count) print j,count[j]}' absentee_by_mail_accepted.csv
   (Okay — this is a super weird one. Basically, I look for the data after that "MAIL" info which is the "ballot request party")

This last one then prints out how many folks of what parties returned mail-in ballots this cycle:

"GRE" 612

"UNA" 334395

"CST" 307

"LIB" 4426

"DEM" 437882

"REP" 201855

In other words, of roughly 1 million mail-ins, 43.7% were from registered Democrats, 20.1% from registered Republicans. This is a margin of 23.6% which is much closer to that 26.7% from earlier in the thread. And that's assuming both that everyone voted straight party and that all the rest of the vote splits evenly!

If the Very Large unaffiliated vote block tilted just a couple percent toward Biden, that's enough to put it over.

Note that the difference between the 26.7% Biden needs to make up and the 23.6% party differential is 3.1%. Now, check out this exit poll by party. Biden won independent voters in person by 5%. Of course, that's 5% of 30% polled, so 1.5% of the total vote.

Not the most hopeful sign, but not too far off either. And especially since we've seen that mail-in votes tended to lean Biden in other places around the country and nearby (*ahem* Georgia), the margin may still be there.

In other words, if you're a voter who sent in an absentee ballot in NC, please go look up to make sure it's been counted! If you signed the wrong place or didn't get a witness for instance, there may still be a chance to cure your ballot so it counts. Start by going to make sure it was counted.

CAVEAT: I am not saying this is likely. It's still an outside chance. The 5% outstanding is just someone's guess. The math is my own and thus may have errors. But it still has led me to rethink writing off NC as solid red at this point. YMMV.

Data sources:

• New York Times North Carolina Election Results
• NC State Board of Elections absentee data
  
• CBS NC Exit Poll
  
• NC BallotTrax